The History of the Y2K Problem (1)


Almost without fail, the first question asked when somebody learns about the Year 2000 problem is, "How was this allowed to happen?". To most people, the thought that so much damage could be done, by so many people, over such a long period of time and completely undetected, is absolutely beyond belief!

The plain truth of the matter is that the Year 2000 issue has always been there. Programmers have been aware of this problem for years. Unfortunately for us, because of the "I won't be around in 15 years, so it doesn't concern me" attitude displayed by our predecessors, the problem has gone largely unchecked in the IT industry. It's only because the likely implications of the Y2K crisis are almost on top of us, and because companies now stand to lose large amounts of money, that the issue is now finally receiving the attention it deserves.

When examining the underlying reason for the cause of the problem, two culprits arise. The first, and certainly the most instrumental reason, is the issue of storage space in the 1960's & 70's.

During this era, the cost of storing data was far from insignificant. In an effort to minimise storage costs, most IT projects would make a concerted drive to cut down the amount of stored data required by an application. In this atmosphere of conservation, no stone was left unturned. Numeric storage space was drained to the smallest possible data type. Character storage space was cut to the bone, and before long, dates would feel the cut of the surgeon's knife!

At the time, it was considered uneconomical to store the full four digits of a year, including the century, when only the two-digit year part was actually needed. Programs were able to continue processing dates as normal without ever understanding the concept of a century, so why not take out the century part altogether and save all that storage space? So, instead of storing a date as "4/5/1968", programmers began to store dates as "4/5/68".

The copyright of the article The History of the Y2K Problem (1) in Software Re-engineering is owned by Faisal Bin Bashir. Permission to republish The History of the Y2K Problem (1) in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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